Summary

Newspapers trumpeted Vicente Fox's election as Mexico's president with the headlines "Ya Cambio" -- Change Is At Hand. Fox ousted Mexico's ruling party, the PRI, and ended its seventy-one years in power. But as Sam Quinones convincingly shows in this book, much of Mexico was changing before the July 2000 presidential elections. Fox's victory marked the triumph of another Mexico, a vital, energetic, and creative Mexico tracked by Quinones for over six years and perceptively presented in this book.

Quinones merges keen observation with astute interviews and storytelling in his search for an authentic modern Mexico. He finds it in part in emigrants, people who use wits and imagination to strike out on their own. In poignant stories from north of the border -- about Oaxacan basketball leagues in southern California and the late singing legend Chalino Sanchez whose songs of drug smugglers spurred the popularity of the narcocorrido -- Quinones shows how another Mexico is reinventing itself in America today. But most of his stories are from deep inside Mexico itself